Snagit Review

I have recommended N screenshots, screen shots, note maps, and management software. The leaders in almost every field have been introduced by us. I just had a regret before the release of this article, that is, I failed to do it for Snagit. Do a deep review, recently Snagit update 4.0, has a great change in the interface and function, just take this opportunity to talk to you about this comprehensive software in the above four areas. Snagit 4 adds new features such as screenshots (Preset), panorama capture (Panoramic Capture), shades and colors, toolbar customization, GIF animation generation.

Personally think that although the positioning is comprehensive software, but Snagit is still partial, the advantages of screenshots and drawings are the most obvious, video editing and file management is not as deep as Capto and Pixave, but this still cannot shake Snagit in production environment. With the strongest position of the professional screenshot/drawing tool, Snagit has the most complex and highly integrated Menubar screenshot menu in the industry (below). Built-in Image and Video two capture functions, respectively responsible for screenshots and screen capture work, and you can also choose to combine Image and Video into one, use “All-in-One” to put screenshots and screen capture in the same capture Take the area and wait for the operation.

Before the operation, the user has many personalized choices that can be set in advance. For example, in the screenshot channel, you can select the interception method, including:

At the same time, you can also choose the built-in 7 default picture border effects, each of which can be customized parameters. Select to show/close the cursor, copy the file path to the clipboard, set the delay, and set the Cpature hotkey. These personalization settings can be found in the Menubar screenshot menu. At the same time, we can pre-select the screenshot/screen capture file. Share channel with built-in TechSmith’s official online file sharing service Screencast.com, Mailbox, FTP, Dropbox and macOS’s Share Extension option.

Let’s first talk about Snagit’s rumors on the screenshots. I mentioned that there are 7 kinds of screenshots. Except for the 2nd and 3rd, I think everyone should understand what it means. Full-screen screenshots and front-facing camera screenshots. It is not introduced here. Let’s first take a look at the “Exposé screenshot”. Everyone on the Mac Exposé should know that the quick view of the application window starting with Mac OS X v10.6 was renamed Mission Control in 10.7 Lion, and the corresponding actions have not changed. Four-finger swipe down to focus on the current window, and four-finger swipe up to display all currently open windows. Using “Exposé screenshots” is to help us complete the window capture in the Exposé state, saving time wasted in finding the target window. Looking at the image below, in the Exposé state, we drop the cursor in a window and press the Capture hotkey to save the screenshot to Snagit.

Snagit’s regional screenshots have been specially designed for traditional feature design. They also add a custom scrolling screenshot function at the page level. When you take a screenshot of the webpage launch area, if the width or height of the webpage is higher than the length and width of the browser itself (not limited to whether Full screen status), a yellow bottom white arrow appears in the bottom center, the right middle middle and the bottom right corner of the web page. After clicking, you can start to take screenshots along the indicated direction. This design is different from the seventh web page screenshot. The latter simply scrolls through the entire page.

Next is a panoramic view. Snagit’s panoramic screenshots are inspired by iOS’s panoramic shooting technology, but not on the desktop does not let you pick up the Mac with a front camera to capture realistic panoramic photos, but consider the Web side. You will encounter web content that is significantly larger than the width of the screen, such as map pages, online drawings, or extra-wide forms. Let us look at the animation of the figure below:

In the panoramic screenshot mode, after selecting a webpage to be intercepted, a “Start” blue button will appear in the lower left corner of the highlighted selection box. After clicking, the remaining webpage content will be pulled horizontally to the left, and the panoramic screenshot will start. Click “Stop”. The red button stops the screenshot. This feature should be unprecedented in many screenshot software, but after the author’s actual measurement, especially in the process of intercepting the map page, the panoramic image will have an incomplete display area. The developer has feedback to this question, hoping to Get resolved as soon as possible. At the same time, the two screenshots described above, that is, the scrolling screenshots and the panoramic screenshots are quite large in terms of machine resource usage.

Then there is a screenshot of the menu. I remember that this feature is also available in other software. Snagit’s design is to select “Menu Screenshot” and start Capture. A prompt box will appear in the center of the screen, just open the application’s target menu bar, then Press the key combination “Shift+Control+E” to complete the interception.

Finally, the screenshot of the webpage is different from the scrolling screenshot. This way does not require us to toss the webpage, just paste the URL into the input field in the image below, or drag the URL of the browser directly into the following window (system menu bar Snagit) The icon can also be used to intercept the entire web page without any other operations, suitable for designers to do the whole station design.

After finishing the screenshot, let’s take a look at the screen capture (recording screen). Snagit provides a single function, providing both regional and full-screen recording modes, recording system audio and internal/external microphones. For frequent recording of screen tutorials and demonstrations. Very convenient for users.

Before the screen is recorded, there is a system audio and microphone switch at the bottom of the yellow dotted border, and the screen area can be adjusted at any time. The recorded video can be cut at will. The interaction design here is awesome. This is the easiest and most easy to use video cut design I have ever seen. I can see the slider of the Italian flag style on the playback progress bar in the figure below. Yet? In fact, it is composed of three parts. The green slider and the red slider can control the start and end position of the video you want to cut. The white arrow button can locate the playback position at will. It is no longer difficult to tailor the video you want.

With the 4.x update, the software adds GIF generation for the first time. Users can generate a moderately sized GIF image based on the recorded screen video. The generation speed is very fast. You can see the GIF in the lower right corner of the video playback control bar. Image generation button. Before the generation, you can select the optimization mode for the animation, divided into “Screen Video”, “High Motion Video” and “Custom”. The first two are suitable for normal screen recording and high-speed dynamic video, and the “Custom” is allowed. User-defined GIF generation rules, such as frame rate, canvas size (pixels/percentage), jitter display, loop playback, animation color, etc., can be set by the user.

After reading the screenshot/screen capture section, let’s take a look at the next core function, note, which is the image tag we often say. Snagit’s note-taking function should be the most powerful of the software I have used, Napkin and other votes. The software is definitely not comparable, although they are also very serious, but always give me a feeling of “both living and living.” Snagit’s annotation interface includes the following important components:

Note Style Toolbar (Quick Styles, the red box also includes the record button, save, delete, copy, etc.)
Copy picture
Recently taken image (video) list and Tag management
Effects effects/Notes tool property adjustments
Canvas area
File management portal
The whole structure of the graph interface is neat, and the initial use is somewhat overwhelming. It is not pleasing from the perspective of “face value”, and it may take a while for you to adapt. In addition, 4.0 can be used for users to choose the theme of dark and light colors. The light theme can be seen for a long time. If the eyes are tired, it can be adjusted to a dark theme, which will be more eye-catching.

Snagit’s lot of drawing tools can be used to crush all kinds of similar products I have used. OmniGraffle I have never used it, I dare not evaluate it, but if I take a standard of “drawing” software, I will mark a “note”. Software, it is a little far-fetched. Back to the topic, let’s take a look at the note drawing tools.

1. Mark the arrow. This is standard in all of the drawing tools, but Snagit offers a unique operating experience. Although only single/bidirectional arrows and horizontal lines are available, users can define the style of the arrow (providing the style of the round head), the color of the line, the orientation of the shadow, the thickness, the transparency, the solid line, the dotted line, and the virtual and real lines. Settings, I think that such a rich set of settings in any other software of the same kind should be few. And the most impressive thing is that Snagit’s arrow lines are free to adjust the curve. When you drag the arrow into the operation area, a yellow dot will appear automatically in the middle of the line. Drag the yellow point to move in any direction to move the line. It becomes a beautiful curve. At the same time, the generated curve will have two yellow dots on both sides of the original yellow dot. We can continue to bend and adjust the curve, and go on and go on. This is provided by Snagit. The curve labeling is to avoid the hard arrow lines blocking the content and integrity of the screenshot. The graphs marked by the curved arrows are very clean and tidy. For details, please refer to the previous drawing style.

2. Letter/number labels. This type of annotation is a solid color background with a single letter or number, suitable for use with tutorials / text descriptions, such as describing a thing that requires several steps to complete, then each step can be used in the corresponding letter / number style To mark up, readers can view the text step by step according to 1, 2, 3 or A, B, C in the picture. This annotation tool provides background color fill, text color, graphic style (4 types), style shading, transparency, and text type for user settings.

3. Pattern marking. The pattern labeling should be regarded as the traditional advantage project of Snagit (the Olympic word), because the resources provided are too rich, and dozens of various patterns including cursors, iOS/OS X elements, keyboards, etc. can be found here. These patterns, making a personalized note is no longer difficult x2.

4. Text annotation. The shape of the text annotation is not too much, but the properties that can be adjusted are very complete. For example, you can set the color of the text, border color, shadow position, font, thickness, font size, line width, transparency; Add underline and dashed lines to the text to set the horizontal and vertical alignment.

5. Border labeling. The setting of the border label is basically the same as the text label. It provides four shapes of rectangle, rounded rectangle, round and ellipse, and can be used to mark the shape of the border in real time like an arrow.

6. Graphics plus text annotations. This kind of labeling is very similar to the previous “alpha/numeric labeling”. It only provides a wide variety of graphics. There are various “dialogs”, “irregular arrows”, “inner ideas” and so on. You can do this in Properties – Select in Shape.

7. Zoom in on the part. Partial zooming is also a common type of graphing tool. It is suitable for highlighting the object content that the author wants to emphasize. For example, if you want to describe a new function button in a window, you can use partial zoom to highlight it and give the reader a deep impression. impression. Snagit’s partial zoom provides the set permissions for the magnifying glass border color, magnification, and row height.

Document management

Let’s take a look at the last core feature of Snagit: file management. Compared with software such as Pixave, Snagit’s file management can only be said to be barely enough. I think that a software does not have to be done in all aspects. In fact, it is not easy for any developer or developer to do this. a little. The software provides storage and management of all screenshots/screen capture files. The left sidebar can be sorted according to the file type, or it can be classified according to the captured application image. In addition, the files under each category can also be arranged in order/reverse order by adding date, name, and size.

Two points of experience

After introducing the core features of Snagit, I will talk to you about two new features of Snagit 4. One is that Snagit uses the boot popup, click on the “exclamation mark” button in the upper right corner of the note window, and a “Getting Started” will pop up. A window composed of “What’s New”, this window is called “Tips and Update”. New users who use Snagit for the first time or old users who have just upgraded 4.0 can quickly learn about the core features and new features of the software. Whenever you click on each function, a corresponding animation will pop up. You can click inside. “Learn More” for a detailed introduction to this feature, if you have already done this in the software, a check mark (meaning Done) will appear before the corresponding Tips. Slowly, as you become more familiar with Snagit, every feature in “Tips and Update” will gradually change to Done. I think this guide design is quite interesting, and similar designs have appeared in MacPaw’s software.

The other is Snagit’s Toolbar customizable design. Right click on the top toolbar and select “Customize Toolbar” to enter the Toolbar settings interface. A tool add/delete window will pop up, you can drag the existing Toolbar option down. , cancel its display, or drag the plotting tool, Menubar option, and share item that do not appear directly on the Toolbar below onto the Toolbar. At the same time, for the sake of beauty, we can also drag Space into the Toolbar, that is, the gap.

Toolbar custom design operation diagram:

In general, Snagit is a comprehensive software with obvious advantages in the screenshot/note map field. She provides up to 6 kinds of screenshots, more than ten kinds of annotation tools, and rich in annotation styles to meet different requirements. Professional user note-taking requirements, built-in video recording, GIF generation, file management, customizable Toolbar are also very convenient for users to save the steps of calling other software, greatly improving the work efficiency, is the developer, designer The necessary tools for editing daily work, currently sold on the official website, Snagit 4, priced at $49.95, from $3.0 to 4.0, $24.95.